SOMETIMES I FORGET to explain things. Like years ago, when a friend was visiting me from Switzerland. I did the all-America thing and took him to his first baseball game. A sportswriter’s daughter, I was whirling away on the infield fly rule, and rolling out lavish descriptions of Cooperstown in autumn, when I noticed he looked a little dazed. What could be the problem, I wondered? He looked at me. He looked at the field. We were somewhere deep in the seventh inning. And then he asked me, “What’s a base?”
And so it is with many writing terms. Take the op-ed for example. Sometimes I go on about them, only to receive emails asking what they are. Sorry. I should always explain this, or so I’ve been told in countless emails. My apologies to all. I suggest you never escort me to a baseball game, either. Let me see if I can do a little better here for you.
What is An Op-Ed?
Opposite your newspaper’s editorial page is a page of columns written by people like you. These are people with points of view, those same people whose voices you hear on both local and national public radio in those lovely quirky essays those outlets like to run.
Of course, not all op-eds are pieces of memoir, but when they are, they employ that invincible weapon of putting a face to an issue. As they say, if you want someone to remember it, either make it rhyme or put it to music. Putting a face to an issue also does that, making it a device that gives an argument its melodic line.
On which of life’s big topics have you got some expertise? Are you caregiving an aging relative? Raising children? Have you got a small vignette that illustrates a solution to a large urban problem, or one that heightens and adds to our understanding of just how wonderful some overlooked aspect of rural life can be? Perhaps your husband’s cancer care gave you a new take on the health care debate. Maybe you teach, and by illustrating how federal budget cuts look in your specific classroom, you can predict how our children may fail in future. Tell us.
Use Your Authority
Using your skills at writing memoir, you can now write it down and speak up. What we’re looking for on the op-ed page are voices of authority, so you’ll need to do some credible reporting to ascertain the facts and figures—how many patients worldwide, the status of current legislation, the senator holding up that legislation—after which your reader will know what to do by changing her vote, making that call, or sending that check.
The timing of op-eds is key, and, like everything else in the newspaper, is dictated by what is known as the news peg. This is the reason the piece appears on a particular day or in a certain season—it’s Mother’s Day, for instance, or stroke awareness month. News pegs are essential even to blog posts: We read about soup in winter (unless it’s chilled soup, of course), shaping up for swim season in spring, and cooling down in summer. Knowing when to tell your tale is essential to your success, by assuring your reader that you are informed about what is going on in the world, and are reacting from an informed place. Bloggers and Tweeters forget this all the time, thinking that just because it happened to them at this moment, I might be interested. They’re wrong. Here’s my tip: Take notes on your life and file them by season, planning your work around the calendar. Do so, and when there is breaking news that is on your topic, you can make your move.
Tell Your Personal Tale
Maybe you’ve been writing pieces all along with the hope of one day publishing on your family’s hereditary disease, or its third generation shrimping business. Maybe, like me, you had a mother with Alzheimer’s disease, and every once in a while you get real heated up on some aspect of the research. Yours is the voice we want to read when research gets slashed, or the next oil rig pollutes our planet.
Using your personal tale to illustrate a larger topic is an unsung wonder of memoir. So read those op-ed pages, and rock the world.
Want to learn to write op-eds? I’ve got the online class for you. I co-teach this class with an award-winning newspaper editor who is also a former Pulitzer Prize juror, weekly newspaper columnist and host of a nationally syndicated radio show. Join us. Here’s more on the online op-ed class for you. Don’t see a date that works for you? Check back soon. More are posted all the time.
